April 2016. The Phone Call.

I’ll never forget this day (I don’t remember the exact “day” but one day in April) my husband, Brandon, and I were at my parents’ house visiting. At this time, we lived in Jacksonville, FL where I was teaching 4th grade and Brandon was traveling back and forth to Pensacola every Monday-Friday for his job. *A little background story first- ever since Brandon and I graduated from College at The University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida we had moved a total of 7 times…yes, 7! The moves were either for job opportunities for my husband to help advance his career or selfish reasons to move closer to our family and friends. We lived in Texas, Pensacola, South Carolina, Orlando and a couple times in Jacksonville. So this past time living in Jacksonville, Brandon was working remote from his job in Greenville, South Carolina but was helping to get their office in Pensacola running efficiently—hence the weekly travel to Pensacola.

OK back to the main point of this story. We had found out in January that we would be expecting our first baby in September 2016. We were beyond thrilled, excited, nervous but mostly couldn’t wait to become parents! We have two amazing golden retrievers that we consider our fur children and do everything with! So to be expecting an actual human child gave, some of our family members, a sense of relief that we would stop dressing up our dogs for every holiday and have an actual human being we could do that to. But nothing has changed, we still treat them like children. Any who, my husband will always entertain a phone call, email, whatever it might be for a job that seems to be worth talking about. A few days leading up, Brandon said one of his old co-workers that he started at his first job out of college with, had reached out via email and wanted to talk/catch up on life, work etc. She mentioned she was currently working at a start-up company in San Francisco. When Brandon had told me he would follow up with a phone conversation I thought nothing of it. Well, I remember on this particular day at my parents’ house, Brandon stepped outside to take this phone call. And something inside of me was stirring/afraid that this conversation was going pretty well. I honestly thought at the time Brandon would entertain the conversation but since the company was out in California there would be no question to us moving. Mind you, we were having our first baby that year! Well, after about an hour he hung up and I sort of portrayed that I was interested in how it went but in the back of my mind I remember specifically saying to myself, “no way, we will not be entertaining this.” Up until this point, I considered myself a very supportive wife with my husbands’ career. I would get excited with a new opportunity that came our way, which meant moving again. And some of our moves that led us to Jacksonville were selfish reasons like I said so I was always OK with those moves. But I always knew I wanted my job to be a stay-at-home momma and raise our children. So with my husband being the main provider, I kind of had to be ok with moving around. Or “new adventures” is what I like to call them.

After Brandon said the phone conversation went really well, he proceeded to tell me that he would follow up – with my permission- with the other co-workers from this company. I told him to go ahead because I knew it wouldn’t hurt, but inside I was freaking out at the thought of us potentially moving across country!!